this is my favorite goodreads review (i review everything i read on there) because it was a kind of a review as you go experiment. i reviewed the book ‘outlander’. which i did, BTW, have a chance to read at a historic b&b, both in the bath AND in my bed, next to a fireplace. spoilers ahoy.
11/1 i’ve been reading this for ten days. i like it but i’m taking a break because i’m a little bored. there’s so much scenic highland sex (“making love”), even for a writer who writes a fuck ton about sex, it’s a lot of sex.
11/24 this: claire almost almost went back to the future but decided she didn’t miss her husband in 1943 (or whenever) *that* much and would rather stay in 1700’s scotland and get laid all the time by a hunky twenty-three year old in a kilt. even though she almost just got burned alive because people think she’s a witch.
12/2 believe it or not, the book is not over yet. there is actually two hundred more pages. jamie hasn’t asked claire any questions about the future yet! WTF??? isn’t that all you’d want to know about if you married someone from the future on accident? wouldn’t you be like, “dude, how do we get rich?”. i’m sorry, but that’s what would happen. instead, the book has the newly weds wandering through the bucolic scottish countryside, never discussing that one of them is *from the future*! also, now that they’ve been married for a summer, the sheathing (which is what my husband calls this book) is falling dangerously low.
12/10 claire helps sister-in-law have a graphic birth experience (in which a stretched perineum is described and massaged….omg, i’m cringing) and then sadly wonders why she hasn’t gotten pregnant with jamie’s baby yet. i’m confused. she wants to be pregnant while living in the past, wandering the countryside with an outlaw from the british she married over the summer? oh yeah, and she almost got burned as a witch. can you give it six months, claire?
12/18 i can always tell when claire is about to get raped (attempted rape, i should say, no one has actually raped her) because all of a sudden claire starts talking about how said rapists handsomeness or strong arms or good jaw. jeeze, claire.
12/20 woah, claire is taking some chances on healing her sexually tortured highland hunk by getting him super high on opium. can’t say i was expecting any of this.
12/22 i wish goodreads had half stars, because i think this is more three and a half for me, but there was clearly so much love and historical research and character development poured into this book by it’s author that i think i can bump it to four and feel good about it—even if it wasn’t wholly my kind of book. this book was recommended to be by an barnes and noble worker as “intelligent trash” and i think that’s a good heading for it, though i might be more inclined to say it’s more like a “really real life romance novel”. like if a romance novel were to ACTUALLY happen to you, outlander is what it would be like. and i think that’s great. and a little funny.
pandorasaurus:
I hadn’t drank in a week and wasn’t planning on doing so for another two. But Outlander promises sex soon and I don’t know what goes better with fictitious, Scottish, carnal encounters than wine.
